M.Davies Urban folk.

Look at the image. No cars. It's all people. True, it's urban life of yesteryear. It is what has gone. An urban mode of life that has been lost.

Why so? The low suburban densities now common in Australian cities have developed since the automobile initiated the process of suburban sprawl. Suburbia is a seen to the solution to the disadvantages (noise, squalor congestion etc) of city life. It is premised on a love affair with the car.

Can the people city be recovered in a new form? Can we re-envision an urban life that is no longer dominated by the car? An urban life that gives some space to people to play.

Now a few ideas taken from Gilles Deleuze.

As an urban people our desires are to enhance and preserve an urban form of life and it does so by connecting to other desires. Power can be seen as the expansion of desire rather than the repression of desire. Hence we have our desires for a people-orientated city producing interests, which are coded----as a people-orientated city----and so regular, collective and organized forms of social desire.

A bit of imagination leads to Carfree cities A dense urban core is now developing in Australian cities buth the congestion is due to all the trucks and cars.from the modern city. In urban streets dedicated to human uses the perception of congestion is considerably reduced.

The burgeoning popularity of the New Urbanism signifies that urbanites realize that something about urban life was lost when urban planners, engineers and politicians allowed the car to dominate the urban landscape. We now realize that it is time to try something else, without necessarily returning to the urban patterns that were common before the automobile's arrival. The New Urbanism:

"....is the revival of our lost art of place-making, and is essentially a re-ordering of the built environment into the form of complete cities, towns, villages, and neighborhoods - the way communities have been built for centuries around the world. New Urbanism involves fixing and infilling cities, as well as the creation of compact new towns and villages."